The Ratiu Foundation is happy to announce that the Winner of the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translation 2011 is Judith Wilkinson for her translation of Raptors by Toon Tellegen.
Tellegen’s poem sequence about a dysfunctional family marks a major Dutch writer at the height of his powers, and a “sustained tour de force” of translations.
Judges Sasha Dugdale and Jane Draycott said: “Toon Tellegen’s Raptors gives mythic shape to the experiences of a child growing up in a dysfunctional family… His complex, often surreal and always highly affecting poems exhibit an understanding of the power of the story in which the dream-like psychology, the marvellously nuanced telling of a family’s malaise set him apart as an entirely distinctive voice in European poetry.”
The sequence of poems that makes up Raptors assembles, piece by piece, an image of a family dominated by a capricious, abusive father whose “ominous, manic energy” takes its toll on each of them separately as well as on the family unit. Each poem begins with the phrase, “My father”. Surreal images, darkness and humour, clinical observation and deep psychological insight inform this portrait of a family, and ‘father’, invented by Toon Tellegen:

My father a lonely dead man among countless immortals,
no one died as often, as daily and disastrously
as he did
and those who saw him die became uneasy and awkward.